national pride

Today is American Independence Day, and once again, I’m compelled to remind us of the importance of patriotism in a world that is slowly but surely rejecting it as I write this. Exactly last year I wrote about the importance of national identity, and in that same spirit, I now write about why America deserves its place as the greatest nation on Earth.

Every Independence Day, or rather every year close to that time, you’re bound to get some sour grapes leftist and cultural Marxists whinging about how “America was never great”, or they’ll use the day as yet another stick with which to beat the President with. You get leftists demonising patriotism on the time of the year when people want to celebrate it. Of course we know why they constantly denigrate the American patriotic spirit, and that’s because they despise America. They despise everything America stands for because America isn’t like socialist Europe, and most Americans don’t want the country to be like socialist Europe.

This miss everything about what makes America great in the first place. What makes America great is not just the primacy of liberty in American culture, but also the opportunity for ordinary people to make something of themselves. America has a proud history of hardworking people (Henry Ford for example) busting their backs and using their free time to put their ideas into practice and make something of themselves. Many of America’s industries were born from hardworking people who were given the freedom to try out their ideas in the marketplace, and their success created jobs and wealth to an extent not seen before in the other powerful nations.

The greatness of America is also proven by the character of the American people. John F. Kennedy once said of Americans:

“The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an inventor, and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly.”

I know from experience that Americans are generally optimistic. Not all of them of course, but I have noticed that Americans tend to be more optimistic that us pessimistic Brits. Despite what Hollywood and the left-wing media might tell you about Americans (including the amount of times people lump everyone in with the South), most Americans are decent, hard-working people just like us. In a way, the American people make America great, despite what the left will tell you.

The left has spent much of its energies downplaying and demonising American exceptionalism, because they cannot accept the reality that America really is the best country on Earth. For them to accept it means also accepting that their ideology will only harm the people they are trying to help, and they would be forced to abandon it, which they won’t do even if the facts are in their favour. Besides, American exceptionalism didn’t come out of the air. It came on the back of America’s many achievements.

They created the first society with liberty as one of its founding principles, and one that enshrined freedom of speech and expression.

They brought us much of the technology we take for granted, such as cell phones, personal computers, and the Internet.

They led the ideological battle against communism during the Cold War, and together with Britain and West Germany, they won.

America has done more to liberate the world than any other country.

America has created a society more welcoming of people of all different backgrounds than any other in the world, and most of the immigrants who come there want to be part of the culture.

Of course there’s a whole laundry list of achievements you could attribute to America, but you wouldn’t necessarily need it. The truth of American exceptionalism is self-evident. Why else would people like myself want to emigrate to America? If America was a horrible place to live in, why would anyone want to live there?

I’m personally sick of the idea that “America was never great”, and idea usually spouted by entitled leftist hipsters who are pissed off that the government is no longer interested in giving them free stuff to compensate for the fact that their liberal arts degrees won’t give them a paying job. These Starbucks Marxists in places like HuffPost or Vox are so bitter that they want all of us to be as bitter as they are, and they don’t care how good they have it in America. But this year, even as leftists continue to paint America as a nation in disarray (which, to be honest, is pure propaganda), remember that it’s all just agitprop, because America was always great, and I have faith that it will continue being a great nation in the future, unless of course the government screws it up again.

Today is of course American Independence Day, and as I celebrate the 240th anniversary of the great nation where I spent my formative years, I’m reminded of the reason why America was founded, and the revolutionary war that led to the creation of a country that believed in liberty from the beginning. If I lived there, of course I would be proud to call myself an American, but over the past decade the left has been working to making American culture seem like an unequivocally shameful thing in what I understand is some sort of vainglorious attempt by the progressive establishment to shame people into rejecting their national identity.

The same has been happening in Britain for a long time, and I think that the ongoing aftermath of Brexit has exposed the leftist elite’s contempt for the very concept of national sovereignty. People who voted Leave in the referendum were vilified as racists, xenophobes and fascists simply because they valued their own national identity and culture, rather than the empty globalist farce that is the achievable dream of a borderless world. Until then, I had no idea just how much the British electorate valued their culture, and even before the vote, I sympathised with one of the driving concerns of those who intended to vote Leave – they were tired of being called “racist” simply because of their concerns about immigration. Indeed after the vote, the young people who voted Remain began dismissing their elders as “racist xenophobes” who “robbed their future”.

How is this relevant? It showed that the young Remain supporters had complete and utter contempt for the very idea of national pride, or even a national identity. Living in Wales, I find this rather odd because you have plenty of people who have a strong belief in Welsh identity. Indeed, I know one or two young people who would happily support Plaid Cymru because they think Wales should be run by the Welsh government rather than from England, and yet the majority of young people in Wales seemed to be in support of Remain, indicating that they have no problem with Britain being controlled from Brussels. I fail to see the logic in that.

What I want to know is how did national identity become such a cardinal sin to modern society? I think the problem is that many people seem to have been convinced that national identity is only capable of dividing people based on arbitrary conditions, but while I agree that it’s stupid to label people based on something that they didn’t choose, I also believe that if people choose to embrace their national identity, then we have no right to judge them for it. I also believe that national identity has been given a very bad image by the mainstream establishment in both Britain and America.

In America, patriotism became associated with supporting the inept interventionist policies of George W. Bush, and a lot of conservatives in America did exactly that. This led to a number of liberals and progressives leaping to the assumption that patriotism was synonymous with blind acquiescence to the will of the state, and I think that’s a mistake. What followed was a continuous assault on American exceptionalism (as demonstrated by the monumental bullshit spewed by Jeff Daniels’ character in The Newsroom), and now that conservatives have lost the public debate in America, the progressives have continued their campaign of liberal guilt and political correctness, and now it has given rise to the success of Donald Trump.

In Britain, the media has created a narrative in favour of multiculturalism, such to the extent that any who dare question it are branded as either “racists” or “far-right extremists”. In 2011, current PM David Cameron delivered speech in which he said that “multiculturalism has failed”. Naturally, critics such as Sadiq Khan accused him of effectively giving propaganda material to the English Defence League, a far-right protest group that was created in order to combat the rise of radical Islam in British communities. Of course, I’m not a nationalist, and I certainly would not support the EDL, mainly because they are too extreme for my tastes, but I believe that the rise of organisations like the EDL are a symptom of a deeper problem.

The problem is that state multiculturalism (which David Cameron was criticising) really has failed, and before you get the wrong idea, there is a reason why. Before David Cameron was elected, the New Labour government was promoting a doctrine of state multiculturalism with the intention of “changing the face of Britain” forever. However, the Blair government oversaw a blatant open border policy which was implemented purely for political ends. Multiculturalism succeeds when migrants assimilate into the culture they emigrate to. Blair’s multiculturalism, however, involves allowing the free expression of all cultures except the national culture. His plan was to make our national culture into a cosmopolitan culture, but you can’t claim to be open to all cultures while silencing those who express our indigenous culture. The reason multiculturalism isn’t working is because you often have people who refuse to assimilate, and if you dare point out the problems associated with that, you are condemned as a racist. UKIP’s Nigel Farage is a man who often gets called a racist (if, that is, he’s not being called a twat) simply for standing up for national identity. New Labour’s failed experiment also led to a rise in crimes that weren’t punished because the authorities feared being called racists. Because of that, we saw the rise of the EDL and the British National Party, and the tempers of some of the nastier elements of society are only getting worse.

To me, the establishment is forsaking the concept of national identity in favour of the idea of “global citizenship”, a concept that nobody really wants any part of when they actually learn what it is. The idea of global citizenship is based on getting rid of the idea of nations and replacing it with state-free citizenship of a globalised world, and the only people pushing for that idea are leftist celebrities, opportunistic politicians, EU bureaucrats, educational institutions, and idealistic youngsters who found themselves conned by any of the former. Is it any wonder why people are rejecting it?

The idea of global citizenship is really empty and pretentious, and it’s impossible to achieve, mainly because the very idea of getting rid of one’s national identity is profane to most of us. This relentless push for global citizenship at the expense of alienating working class Britons is exactly what is causing the populist revolution spreading across the Western world. They’re also tired of being racist if they object, and I’m getting tired of leftists trying to use the worst parts of our history in order to shame us into agreeing with them. Why should we be ashamed to British? We live in the country that abolished slavery, and made sure the rest of the world ended it as well, and we played a key role in defeating the Nazis. Are we Britons supposed to be ashamed of that?

Progressives in America won’t stop trying to make Americans feel like America is a horrible country, and I refuse to believe that because America was the first country that was founded on liberty from the ground up. America also ended the Second World War (albeit in a very regrettable fashion), landed a man on the Moon, and they also gave the world the technological advancements that the rest of the world takes for granted. It might not be perfect, but I think it’s very immature to judge a nation just for its faults, whether they’re in the past or the present. It’s not good for a country to become ashamed of itself. Look at Germany for example, a country so mired in guilt over the atrocities of the Nazi government, that it is a cultural norm. You even have an “anti-fascist” movement that is actively against their own home country, to the point of openly calling for the death of ethnic Germans. I’m thankful that Britain isn’t at that point yet, but if this is what the globalist progressives are aiming for, then it’s no wonder that British people are rejecting the globalist ideas the establishment and the media are propagating.

In conclusion, a lot has been said about national identity. If you believe the mainstream media and the leftist social justice mob, then you’ll be convinced that it is racist or stupid to even consider national identity, or that nationality is another useless concept that serves only to divide us. While I think it’s pointless to divide people based on something they do not control, I don’t believe that nationality is only capable of dividing people. In fact, nationality can be something that unites people, because for most people nationality reminds them of the country’s heritage, and we in Britain enjoy a very rich cultural heritage, but whether or not you value any of that is ultimately your choice. You shouldn’t have to feel bad about it just because somebody told you that you’re racist if you care about national sovereignty.

The bottom line here is that we shouldn’t go around convincing people that caring about one’s national culture is “racist” just because a few nasty characters have used nationalism as an ideology to justify bigotry, because that kind of intellectual dishonesty can only lead to one being just as bigoted as the nationalists towards people who hold different ideological beliefs. If we are to learn anything from Brexit, it’s that clearly people aren’t buying the whole “global citizenship” nonsense anymore, and it’s only a matter of time before we reach the nadir of the globalist fad.

Like this:

Ever since I my time in America ended, I’ve felt firmly attached to American culture, which is why when I settled back into the UK, I never fully integrated with British culture. Living in Wales, it was always hard to integrate with Welsh culture, so I never really bothered trying. Ever since my school days, I didn’t want much of anything to do with Welsh culture because I saw it as something everyone else was a part of.

I don’t resent living in Wales, but I never really got attached to Welsh culture. Then again, back when I was a kid, all I wanted to do was create. I didn’t want anything to do with nationality, the Welsh language, national pride, and all the other political crap that I had no idea even mattered to people back then. Today, it’s largely the same situation, except now I do know about all the political crap, but I get very sick of it.

One issue that has constantly pervaded my life in Wales in the Welsh language. The local government in Wales wants to bolster the language all they can, and in Wales, learning the local language in school has been compulsory since the time I was in school. However, due to varying circumstances revolving around my autism, I never learned Welsh. Of course, when I was a kid, that didn’t bother me one bit. However, I eventually heard of cases where people who didn’t know the Welsh language had less of a chance of being employed than people who were fluent in Welsh.

I have no idea if anything about that has changed since 2012, but I still didn’t like that at all. Ever since then, I became ever more cynical about living in Wales until, after one of several depressingly introspective moments I’ve encountered in my new course, I ultimately concluded that, even in childhood, I never intended to live in Wales permanently anyway.

In conclusion, living in Wales, for me, has been quite patience-trying, due both to my longing to come back to America, and because I never identified with Welsh culture at all. I don’t really have much resentment. After all, I can’t really resent a nation with a variety of outstanding castles and landscapes that could potentially inspire an artist like myself. However, in many ways, I feel so apart from Welsh culture that it’s almost as though I’m an outsider in my own home country. To put it simply, the sooner I get back to America, the better.